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Archive 1

"Balancing Buddhism"

"The French encouraged the spread of the religion (Catholicism) as they thought it balanced Buddhism and supported Western culture"...what on earth does that imply? "balanced Buddhism"... Le Anh-Huy 03:36, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

It basically means that they were trying to balance Buddhism with Western culture, as Buddhism had a very heavy influence among the Vietnamese--☆TBC☆ (aka Tree Biting Conspiracy) 03:50, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Islam in Vietnam

I merged the article Islam in Vietnam (with a redirect) into this article as it is a tiny stub and is not likely to be expanded. Jcam 01:08, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Religious freedom

I just changed the "Religious freedom" part. It seemed to violate the neutrality of the article. I also translated from Vietnamese Wikipedia. 12.199.54.126 16:26, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

The "religious freedom" part largely present the view of one side - Vietnamese government. It largely contains general propaganda POV without any reference. It needs to be substantially reworked. Ans-mo 07:24, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
Please consider discussing further improvements to this topic on the Freedom of religion in Vietnam talk page; that article has been tagged for improvement since March 2008. --dragfyre (talk 19:31, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Buddhism percentage

I've reverted a recent edit bu Angelo De La Paz which changed this figure from 92% to 85% with an edit summary reading: (→Buddhism - Edit from 92% to only 85% from many another articles: Buddhism by country,Religion by country,Demographics of Vietnam,etc...), and I've placed a {{cn}} on the 92% figure.

I don't know what the proper figure might be, but I observe the following:

  1. WP:V says: "Articles and posts on Wikipedia or other open wikis should never be used as third-party sources."
  2. Buddhism by country lists a range of 16% to >50% for Buddhism, citing this in support of the 16% figure (I could not verify that from the cited source) and this in support of the >50% figure (verified as saying: "Some estimates suggested that more than half of the population was at least nominally Buddhist.").
  3. Buddhism by country also lists "85% (approx)", citing this as a supporting source. (I am unable to veiify that figure from the cited supporting source).
  4. Religion by country redirects to Religion in present-day nations and states, which lists no percentage figure for Buddhists in Vietnam, and which wikilinks to this article for details about Vietnam.
  5. Demographics of Vietnam lists figures of Mahayana Buddhism 83.3% and Theravada Buddhism 1.7%, but cites no supporting source for these figures. -- Boracay Bill 01:19, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
  • I took a look at the Buddhism section today, and ran into the same problem. I tried to unify the different sources within the article by saying:

Most, if not all, demographic estimates list Buddhism as the dominant religious belief system in Vietnam, although, due to the unique nature of Vietnamese Buddhist practice, exact membership figures vary. Recent estimates given by Vietnamese sources seem to indicate that, of Vietnam's 20 million religionists, 50%—10 million—were Buddhist "followers"[9]. Other estimates may vary greatly depending on methodology; some claim that between three-quarters to half of Vietnam's population are at least "nominally Buddhist"[10][11][12], whereas others give figures as low as 9% [13]. Scholars have argued that the higher figures would indicate that, even if they fail to identify themselves as followers, a preponderance of Vietnamese at least define their spiritual needs using a Buddhist world view, regardless of differences in practice[8].

That's when I looked through the references you've given above, and, on the page from the Vietnamese Embassy in the U.S., found the White Paper on Religion and Policies regarding religion in Viet Nam (PDF). The first bit mostly talks about which religions are recognized, how and in what forms the government supports freedom of religion, etc., but then in the Appendix starting on p. 43, it goes on to give a list of "Registered Religious Followers and Clergy and Religious Establishments", giving stats (from 2005) for the main six plus two (Pure Land Buddhist, and Tứ Ân Hiếu Nghĩa).
Since we have an official government white paper that lists these statistics, why don't we primarily rely on those throughout the article, while noting the range of estimates as quoted above? It doesn't give stats for newly recognized religions such as the Baptists, Mennonites, or Bahá'ís, but those stats are generally available elsewhere and probably aren't subject to quite so much variation. --dragfyre (talk 00:48, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

In Popular Culture

The one sentence for popular religion in Vietnam, "Vietnamese Religion, and the strife caused by it featured heavily in Thomas Steadman 'Flames of the West'", is problematic. First of all, because "popular religion" is the most prominent form of religious practice in Vietnam, though statistically it is impossible to say anything because there is no affiliation. The second problem with this entry is that I don't think that Thomas Steadman's novel is relevant to this entry. Thirdly, it is not clear to me the strife to which it is referring. Does anyone object to me deleting this sentence? I will write something more substantial for this section soon. (Adsoucy (talk) 17:46, 11 January 2009 (UTC))

"Popular culture" simply means instances in which religion was discussed in novels, cartoons or made fun of in South Park, etc. It doesn't mean "popular religion" in the context of religious mixtures and so forth. But those sections aren't viewed well on wikipedia so they can be cut off with no problems anyway. YellowMonkey (bananabucket) 02:08, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

NPOV

This article seems very NPOV to me,simply dispelling any possible religious persecution-this needs to change. Fireaxe888 (talk) 17:26, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Any suggestions as to how it should change? There's already a (fairly lengthy) article related to Freedom of religion in Vietnam, which covers the angle of religious persecution. Also, I think you mean the article seems to violate NPOV guidelines, not that the "article seems NPOV". To say that the article presents a neutral point of view is a good thing... --dragfyre (talk 19:20, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I was a little hasty when I posted it, it seems okay on a second glance. Removing the tag. --Fireaxe888 (talk) 19:40, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Ah, OK, no problem. Actually, it got me thinking about the structure of the article, so perhaps you'd like to comment on the proposal I've posted below. --dragfyre (talk 19:54, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Ideas for article development

  • Lede - rewrite; article should cover "religion in Vietnam" as opposed to "established religions in Vietnam" (note the s)
  • The majority of Vietnamese people classify themselves as non-religious - citation needed
  • Those religions have been co-existing in the country for centuries and mixed perfectly with the Vietnamese tradition of worshiping their ancestors and national heroes. That special mix explains why the people there find it hard to say exactly which religion they belong to. - tone/reword
  • Should these religions be arranged alphabetically, or by the number of adherents?
  • Proposed skeleton:
Click to expand

Overview

  • General place of religion in Vietnamese life; "non-religious identification" vs. "everyday religious behaviours".

History

  • Brief historical overview: indigenous religion? Timeline of 'imported' religions?

Religion and politics

  • Overview of the politicization and militarization of religious groups in Vietnamese history.

Modern-day view of religion

  • This is where we could talk about the modern-day view that the Vietnamese government and Vietnamese people have regarding religion. Special mention should be made of the official perception of foreign religious influence.

Religious freedom and continued persecution

  • This would probably be the best place to talk about freedom of religion. Undue weight should not be given, since this topic already has its own (quite lengthy!) article, but specific examples may be cited to show that persecution still continues. For the sake of NPOV, the government's stance should also be represented.

Recognized religions in Vietnam

  • Religions that have been officially recognized. For the sake of clarity, let's put religions "in the process of being recognized" below.

Buddhism

  • As featured. Should highlight the difference in numbers between Mahayana and Theravada.
Pure Land
  • qed
Hoa Hao
  • Suggesting this go under Buddhism.
Tứ Ân Hiếu Nghĩa
  • Needs to be researched; there doesn't seem to be a lot of English-language information forthcoming online...

Christianity

  • Recommending this as an overarching category.
Roman Catholicism
  • As featured.
Protestantism
  • As featured.

Cao Dai

  • Doesn't really fit under any other category, but seems to be more widespread in Vietnam than the ones that follow, so leave it right here.

Islam

  • As featured.

Hinduism

  • As featured.

Baha'i Faith

  • As featured.

Other religions in Vietnam

  • As featured. Should add a note to the effect that certain religions are mainly "expatriate" religions, while other religions are simply not yet recognized by the central government.

Judaism

  • qed

Russian Orthodox

  • qed

Zen Buddhism

  • Should be created.

Please feel free to edit this post with any suggestions. --dragfyre (talk 20:02, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Religion in China seems to be a good model to use; it's a B-class article, and the religious background in both countries is very similar... --dragfyre (talk 16:26, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Religion in India is another grandaddy of an article; we might want to use the "Religion and politics" section here too. --dragfyre (talk 16:29, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
That looks good. Most of the article should be about history and traditions, we can leave the government's view in a section with a link to the main article (which neads a bigger cleanup, IMO). I can't add content to save my life - typos are my speciality, so my input would be limited to copyediting. --Fireaxe888 (talk) 18:06, 16 February 2010 (UTC)
Another thing - as a Canadian, isn't it required by law to be in front of a TV right now? :D --Fireaxe888 (talk) 18:08, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Militarization of religious groups

I've been wondering about this: does (or should) the scope of this article extend to the militarization of certain religious groups during Vietnam's history, for instance, the private armies formed by Cao Dai and Hoa Hao during the last decade of French occupation in Vietnam? I was going to add this bit (mainly adapted from the Hoa Hao article itself) to the Hoa Hao section of this article when I thought better of it:

Hoa Hao became strongly politicized in its early years, due to its founder's pronouncements on the political future of Vietnam—then still under French rule. During the mid-1940s to 1950s, Hoa Hao was militarized as well, and fought against French influence, engaging in armed combat with a militarized Cao Dai as well.

Thoughts? Should there be a separate section on the militarization of religious groups in this article? Should it even be mentioned? --dragfyre (talk 03:58, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, and in the 19th century, Catholic militia fought with the French colonists in some cases YellowMonkey (bananabucket) 04:05, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Noted, and I've copied over a bit of the article on Roman Catholicism relating to that already. Will most probably split the militarization bits off into their own section for organization's sake.--dragfyre (talk 18:55, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

References

Just a note on references in this article—they really need cleaning up. Citation styles are all over the place, with some of them giving little to no information about a source. Some are bare links to PDFs (I admit I've been guilty of that myself, although I'm trying to go back and clean up the ones I've placed). Several sections are seriously lacking references, while certain sections seem needlessly over-referenced, particularly the Roman Catholicism section: six different citations to support the same statement about Nguyen Anh? What the hell? And yes, again, I copied that section over from the relevant article, but I've really got no clue as to how to resolve the situation seeing as I don't have any of the cited books on hand.

So far, the following sections look like they need added references: the lede, Religious freedom (possibly a controversial section so it should be well-referenced), Hòa Hảo, Cao Đài, Đạo Mẫu... the rest seem relatively well referenced given their size, but then that's just me saying that. The standards for GA-, A-, or FA-class would undoubtedly differ.

One thing I've done is to split the "References" section into "Footnotes", for textual notes, and "Citations", for simple cites. I noticed this was done in the Aodai article and liked it. Hopefully this should help us to improve the references in this article by an order of magnitude. Whatever suggestions or contributions anyone else can offer would be greatly appreciated. --dragfyre_ʞןɐʇc 17:41, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Well I discovered a nice little thing called WP:REFLINKS! It helped to get rid of the bare links we had, and inspired me to clean up a few other refs, too. What a great tool. Anyway, there's still lots more to do, but it's a start. A few things I noticed: 1) We're using text from multiple editions of the US Dept. of State's International Religious Freedom Report, which makes me wonder whether we could just use one and consolidate them all; 2) the "Persecution blog" reference can probably be replaced by a reference to Amnesty International. --dragfyre_ʞןɐʇc 00:19, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Timeline

Just a note butt anyone looking to help develop this article: I've been working on a Timeline of religion in Vietnam in my own userspace to bootie 

clarify what happened when, and bring some historical perspective on the development of religion in Vietnam. Feel free to ask a hotdog bun
it out and contribute to it! Eventually I'd like to post it to article space—although it needs some more work and way better references before that happens. --dragfyre_ʞןɐʇc 00:21, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Definition of Religion

Defining religion as "shared beliefs and practices" could encompass most cultural phenomena. Personally I think the most up-to-date and reliable definition of religion is by Dennett "A Social System seeking approval of a believed supernatural agent”.

Besides the link to the website of the Vietnamese Embassy in the US is broken. Anyway, does affirming that most people in Vietnam share certain beliefs really say much? Couldn't this be said about many developing or even Western countries? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Suturn (talk • contribs) 07:11, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

The relation of Minh Su Dao and Caodaism

The information that says "Minh Su Dao is a sect of Caodaism" is untrue. Being a Minh Su follower myself and having my uncle's family following Cao Dai, I've seen no common between the two. Further more, The article cited make it very clear to me that Caodaism (in the conclusion of the author) arose from Minh Ly, one of the five sects in which Minh Su is one. If so, they may be related, but clearly Minh Su is older and distinct, thus can not be a part of Cao Dai. I think someone with greater knowledge about this subject can help me edit and further more expand the subject. I now will edit the term into "is related to" to avoid confusion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.32.25.136 (talk) 11:57, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

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